Simon King (1), Thomas Portele, Florian Höfer

We describe a concatenative speech synthesiser for British English
which uses the HADIFIX [8] inventory structure originally developed
for German by Portele. An inventory of non-uniform units was
investigated with the aim of improving segmental quality compared to
diphones. A combination of soft (diphone) and hard concatenation
was used, which allowed a dramatic reduction in inventory size. We
also present a unit selection algorithm which selects an optimum
sequence of units from this inventory for a given phoneme sequence.
The work described is part of the concept-to-speech synthesiser for the
language and speech project Verbmobil which is funded by the
German Ministry of Science (BMBF).